CHAPTER XXXVII.
AFTER THE BAY ST. LOUIS ICEBERG.—WINDSOR CASTLE ICEBERG.—FOUNDERS SUDDENLY.—A BRILLIANT SPECTACLE.
After dinner, upon the heights of Battle Island, gathering roots, plants, and mosses to carry home. We notice with pleasure the largest iceberg by far that we have ever yet seen. It is the last arrival from Greenland, and is abreast Cape St. Louis, in the northeast. It is a stupendous thing, and reminds me of Windsor Castle, as I know it from pictures and engravings. It appears to be wheeling in toward the bay, with a front of great elevation and extent, finely adorned with projections and massive towers not unlike those of the regal structure of which it reminds me. I see by the watch it is nearly 4 P. M., the time set for our departure to a Bay St. Louis berg. Pencil and note-book must be pocketed, and haste be made with my vegetable gatherings.
Pencil and note-book reappear, and the sketch recommences. Half-way to the chosen iceberg, in the mouth of the bay, rowing slowly over the glassy, low swells, as they move in from sea. These are the swells for me: broad, imperial swells, full of majesty, dignity, and grace; placid and serene of countenance; solemn, slow, and silent in their roll. They are the swells of olden time, royal and aristocratic, legitimately descended from those that bore the ark upon their bosom, and used to bear the unbroken images of the orbs of heaven. Replete with gentleness and love and power, they lift us lightly, and pass us over tenderly from hand to hand, and toss us pleasantly and softly from breast to breast, and roll us carefully from lap to lap, and smile upon us with their shining smiles. Grand and gracious seas! With you I love the ocean. With you I am not afraid. And with you, how kind and compassionate of you, ye old patrician billows! with you I am not sea-sick. Save us from those plebeian waves, that rabble-rout of surges, that democratic “lop,” lately born, and puffed into noisy importance! They scare me, and, worst of all, make me sick and miserable.
Every few minutes we hear the artillery of the icebergs, and are on the watch for fine displays, this warm afternoon. C—— is sketching hastily, with the pencil, Windsor Castle berg, now in complete view, and distant, I should guess, five miles. It is a mighty and imposing structure.
Between making my last dot and now—an interval of ten minutes—Windsor Castle has experienced the convulsions of an earthquake, and gone to ruin. To use the term common here, it has “foundered.” A magazine of powder fired in its centre, could not more effectually, and not much more quickly, have blown it up. While in the act of sketching, C—— suddenly exclaimed: when, lo! walls and towers were falling asunder, and tumbling at various angles with apparent silence into the ocean, attended with the most prodigious dashing and commotion of water. Enormous sheaves of foam sprung aloft and burst in air; high, green waves, crested with white-caps, rolled away in circles, mingling with leaping shafts and fragments of ice reappearing from the deep in all directions. Nearly the whole of this brilliant spectacle was the performance of a minute, and to us as noiseless as the motions of a cloud, for a length of time I had not expected. When the uproar reached us, it was thunder doubled and redoubled, rolling upon the ear like the quick successive strokes of a drum, or volleys of the largest ordnance. It was awfully grand, and altogether the most startling exhibition I ever witnessed. At this moment, there is a large field of ruins, some of them huge masses like towers prone along the waters, with a lofty steeple left alone standing in the midst, and rocking slowly to and fro.